Shahtoosh
Shahtoosh , also known as Shatush or, in the German-speaking area, occasionally as royal wool , is a wool that is illegally obtained from the fur of the endangered Tschiru ( Pantholops hodgsonii ), also known as Tibetan antelope. Since the Tschirus cannot be sheared as non-domesticated wild animals, they are killed for it.
The wool is mostly made into luxury shawls, although Shatush is illegal to make, sell, and purchase.
Manufacturing
The wild animals, which are under species protection , are killed for the illegal manufacture of textiles in order to get to the particularly fine, warming woolen hair of the undercoat. The average fiber diameter is 11.45 micrometers with a standard deviation of 1.78 micrometers and a coefficient of variation of 15.55%. Thus the wool hair of the Tschiru is the finest of all animal hair . The wool of three to five animals is needed for one scarf alone, as each Tschiru only produces around 150 grams of the raw wool. As a result, the population has dropped dramatically from around one million in the 1950s to an estimated 75,000 today. Tschirus are among the animal species threatened with extinction. Trading has been banned since 1977.
Prosecution
A 1994 charity raid in New York by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service led to the summons of supermodels and celebrities who bought the scarves, as well as initial criminal proceedings for the sale of this "fabric". In April 2000, British authorities prosecuted a London trading company for illegally possessing 138 shawls - the equivalent of 1,000 antelope skins. Despite some successful arrests of illegal trading rings, a large number of “petty criminals” get away with impunity, as it is mostly claimed that they are pashmina or similar legal substances. A clear clarification that can be used in court can only be obtained after a laboratory examination ( DNA test , measurement under a light microscope or a scanning electron microscope ).
Web links
- Scarves made from the wool of the Tibetan antelope - information from the Swiss Federal Food Safety and Veterinary Office
Individual evidence
- ↑ Kenneth D. Langley: Shahtoosh Fibers , The James Hutton Institute (English). Retrieved January 24, 2013.
- ↑ JC Lee, LC Tsai, CY Yang, CL Liu, LH Huang, A. Linacre, HM Hsieh: DNA profiling of shahtoosh. In: Electrophoresis (2006), Vol. 27 (17), pp. 3359-3362. PMID 16888711 .